


Krummholz

by Hereticality



Category: Sonic the Hedgehog (2020)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Humor, Based on Astra's Little Black Planner, Essentially they've been forced to separate and Robotnik is Not Doing Well(TM), Implied/Referenced Murder, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, Post-Break Up, Robotnik POV, Sad Dr. Eggman | Dr. Robotnik, Suicidal Thoughts, cause it stabbed me so I had to stab back
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-30
Updated: 2020-08-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:07:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26193142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hereticality/pseuds/Hereticality
Summary: [/ˈkrʌmhɒlts/nounstunted wind-blown trees growing near the treeline on mountains.]A chronology of mundane aches, and fear of flying. A countdown to the unknown.Or, a man that is very bad at feelings trying to process a frankly unfair amount of feelings.
Relationships: Dr. Eggman | Dr. Robotnik/Agent Stone
Comments: 12
Kudos: 23





	Krummholz

**Author's Note:**

  * For [astramaxima (shotgunsinlace)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shotgunsinlace/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Little Black Planner](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25758115) by [astramaxima (shotgunsinlace)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shotgunsinlace/pseuds/astramaxima). 



**T-minus 2.5 hours**

His thumb grazes the switch in something akin to a hesitant caress. An irony of tenderness.

It would be so easy. Too easy, perhaps.

There’s perfection in this, of course. A neglected jewel, gleaming still in the August sun. A joy to be shared, but lonely.

It’s never been a matter of _quality._ It has always been a matter of _courage._

The hour is 1430, and he has been standing there a while.

_(Who are you, in the dark?_

_Who are you, on alien soil, more of a stranger than anyone has ever been, more alone than anyone has ever been?_

_Who are you, in exile?)_

In a way, this is giving up. Forfeit, surrender, throw in the towel. Humiliation, yes, and triumph too.

What is triumph, unwitnessed?

The hour is 1515, and he’s been standing there a while.

He doesn’t know where time goes, these days.

*

All records are wiped, all witnesses silenced. All codes made traceless. All routes untrackable.

His affairs, or lack thereof, are in order. He has his terrible anchor, with its battered black cover, its missing page. He has his little dot on the map. And he has his Beloved.

If he wants to go, everything’s ready.

If he wants to go, this is the time.

If he wants to go.

_(Who are you, in the dark?_

_Do you curl up and die quiet, or do you stand up and claw your way out?)_

* * *

***

**T-minus 730 days**

_What was the point, then?_ he wanted to scream. _What was the damn point?_

The paper cup scalded his hand, despite the glove and double-walling, and Robotnik had caved and submitted to the mortifying ordeal of Saying Their Goodbyes. With that alone, he knew he had lost.

Unavoidable, however. If he didn’t do it, he was the asshole. And for once, just this one time, he didn’t _want_ to be the asshole.

He’d been thoroughly silenced. Draped in his old coat, even-faced in a way that should have worried his sad-smiling Judas to mutiny. Eyes full, mouth full, and not a word out of it. His hands, too, full with the coffee and a small black notebook. 

Both were for him. Both seemed sweeter than his Agent usually conceded for.

 _Turn around. Refuse thy name. I’ll give you a new one—a better one. Make one bold move, just one,_ wept the marrow of him, begging, breaking, and he could not speak. May, a month yet crueller, had nothing to ruthless August. _Turn, turn, turn._

It is maddening, how change starts invisible. The shift was seismic, yet wholly unseen, and inside him the lingering ache of intimacy like a secret held. Burning still, low and deep, in his body not as new as it was, not as strong. He stood and wore his black coat like a mourning veil, as his molecules rearranged around the betrayal like tree-bark scarring over barbed wire.

*

He did not take another sip. He did not crane his neck for a last glance in the rear-view mirror. He did not wait for the line of black SUVs to get blurry.

Nothing could ever wound him as deep as powerlessness.

*

Sweltering coat and sweltering coffee and sweltering little book, a pile on his coffee table. 

He blinked and he was in his living-room, speakers still seeping the same playlist as before he had headed out for this last idiotic charade. The unnaturally pristine room felt like he’d wandered through yet another portal—to some awful parallel dimension where his ongoing projects had been moved down to the garage, as socially acceptable as they’ll ever be, and he had _let it happen._

Well. Nobody would be there to make him keep _that_ up, now.

*

He blinked, and the playlist had run out.

The coffee was room-temp, made him sick to his stomach on the second sip. It was his favorite special latte, and it tasted like negative reinforcement. He had no clue where time had gone.

 _Lie down, power off a moment,_ his mind commanded, the ever-wise tyrant. His lateral hypothalamus depleted all its orexin at once, and instantly he was as bone-weary as if he’d been elbow-deep in a project for a week straight.

He took a seat on the empty recliner, wincing. _Maybe you’ll wake up still at that horrid motel._

Hopeless hope, the most powerful opioid. _Yeah, maybe._ He kicked off his shoes, plucked out his contact lenses. The woven texture of the chair under his cheek was about as scratchy as those sheets had been. He let his playlists run, the sound system blending each into the next in a seamless lull.

He wondered if they could last him long enough, if he could just lay there and sleep and listen. August isn’t too early to go dormant. The yellow-bellied marmots are the dumb ones, waiting for winter every year.

The early onset of a migraine thundered through the tension at the base of his neck, making his hands twitch and tingle. He clenched and released them, trapping them under his armpits.

 _I’ve stocked up your cabinet,_ Stone’s voice floated in, ever-helpful even in absence. He curled up under his coat, shivering despite the heat. _Caffeinated Tylenol’s on the left, right at eye level._

He did not move.

*

He turned to the other side under the blanket of his coat, a wax-complexioned _Kumbhakarna._

_Maybe you’ll wake up and there’s still time._

His stubble crept longer. The contacts hardened to shards outside their case. The coffee molded over.

Ashes to ashes, _hyphae_ to _hyphae._

*

**T-minus 713 days**

The new exile brought old clarity.

Robotnik’s world had been smaller since his return, even more than what it used to be. Little more than a binary system, in fact.

He had come back, yes, beckoned by duty and empty ambition, clawing for normalcy. He had roared and thrashed and got his way, regained his rightful place into the heart of the greedy machine that had reabsorbed his life like it never happened. He had draped his old skin around new jagged edges, and carried on doing what he always did. 

A mad(der) scientist, his dear machines, his secret agent. Their blur of boundaries. As it should be.

But his exile had sapped him of patience. He’d been less able to filter out the noise, to withstand the social charades.

*

The world had gone to shit in his absence, and was still suffering the aftershocks.

No one cared about the stack of essays he’d found a way to bring back, penned in rudimentary berry-ink on handcrafted myco-paper (a revolution in itself!). Not an ounce of interest in the extraordinary discoveries he had made, the alien samples he had collected, in his very survival. 

The world was ravaged, and yet—despite his accurate prediction of the whole scenario in his cataclysm assessment of ‘12—they hadn’t wanted him on the vaccine task force. He was to be a state secret—again—not _allowed_ to work on anything within a certain range of the public.

 _Their loss,_ he thought, and tried to stop his mind from starting to connect the vast network of interests behind that decision, behind the active hindering of an efficient and quickly-delivered solution.

Overall, he was _tired._

Despite his long-held position, he’d never grown thick-skinned. He’d never got used to it, that bitter impotence. 

The sense of responsibility, the drive for great and meaningful change clashing again and again with those narrow-minded interests. Money, always money. As if it really _meant_ something. 

The tension and fear and helplessness seemed to radiate off people, everywhere, smothering and accusatory and _oh,_ if it didn’t all make a man wish he were alone on a hostile alien planet again.

At least, over there it was _quiet._

*

He had found a place for stillness, during his alien exile. A space of not-doing, more _other_ to him than the myco-tastic landscape that surrounded him.

And in the space stillness carved out, in came a strange, bone-deep exhaustion. It circled and circled and settled in, draped like a heavy blanket, curled like a cat. It wasn’t physical, not entirely. His body was tired, worn with the malady and malnourishment and the heavier gravitational pull. But he was tired _inside,_ too.

 _Why even try to go back?_ it kept whispering, in its low soothing tones, keeping him hostage to wake-sleep for hours and days at a time. _What is even the point?_

The mushrooms didn’t care about all the glorious creations that will never see the light of day. The mushrooms didn’t care how colossal a failure he was. If he stayed still long enough, they would spread their non-judgmental roots over him all the same, absorb him into the mycelium, draw sustenance from his body as he had drawn sustenance from theirs. And in that perfect exchange, he’d find absolution. He’d find belonging.

There was the reason he had so abhorred stillness on Earth, he thought, as he contemplated how there at the altitude he built his little _alcázar_ at, the only trees that grew were garbled and twisted by the relentless winds.

One has to find kinship, one way or another.

*

But he did go back.

He returned, because the world was lost without him. And in the privacy of himself, he had been so lost without the other component of his binary system, he had to carve it out of rock to keep his wits about him.

_(He points up, points it out. Stone’s eyes dark in the penumbra of the observatory, looking above the machine to simply take it all in. As though the nakedness of his eye could grant him some superior insight, more than what technology could provide. He did it with binoculars, periscopes. With microscopes, even. Endearing, in some laughable way._

_‘And Alpha Centauri’s another one, isn’t it?’ Agent Stone, grinning his heartbreaker’s grin. ‘Reminds me of a TV show I’ve watched last summer.’_

_Stone’s eyes, dark in the penumbra of a motel room, see-through in their insistence, all-seeing in their directness.)_

His memories were always so stark, horror and wonder made one in that inescapable, brutal clarity. Blessing and curse and twice-exceptional, as everything else.

*

The Logs from those stillness-days he spent entombed in otherness were the ramblings of a lunatic. A man losing himself inch by inch, alone and afraid and desperate. He did not want to know that man. He destroyed them without a second thought.

The notebook was on thin fucking ice.

***

**T-minus 708 days**

Of course he could track him, if he wanted.

He was back at the lab, had what was left of his life’s work with him. He had a lot to rebuild and no materials to do so, and had got more sleep than he’d need for a lifetime.

Tracking the Agent wouldn’t be a challenge. Not many things were—which was a bummer, really.

Always made him prone to boredom, prone to ~~distraction~~ destruction.

*

There were purely logical reasons to do it, naturally.

Justification, too, was not a challenge. For example, in the unlikely case that the Agent had already dropped dead at his new post, Robotnik knew that extreme measures would be taken to prevent the news from getting to him. And he couldn’t have that, now, could he? It went against all sense.

There was no choice but to take the matter into his own nano-gloved hands, as usual.

As he hadn’t been able to keep the man, he could at least keep an eye on, keep track, keep tabs.

Justification was not a challenge.

The strangeness of his need for it did not go through the thick duvet of numbness he had pulled around himself.

_(And if, instead, Stone were happier where he was now—it was a certainty he wouldn’t be informed, either.)_

_What’s worse,_ Beyoncé’s Wagnerian soprano rhetorically queried through his headphones, _lookin' jealous or crazy, jealous and crazy? Or like, being walked all over lately, walked all over lately, I’d rather be crazy…_

Destruction for distraction for destruction. Might as well.

*

**T-minus 661 days**

He could not let the quality of his work drop.

*

He might have altered his shift pattern to avoid meeting anyone on base, thus destroying whatever mood-stabilizing efforts regular sleep had laboriously been building since his return to Earth. He might have been producing out of the emergency stash of ideas he had accumulated over the years—as his supposedly brilliant noggin hadn’t deigned to sputter up a mere twinkle of something worthwhile in...

_(Since May, since the letters. Since he—)_

He might have shaved his head again. He might have been spending a disgraceful amount of time pressing his glove to the silent little dot on the screen, instead of doing anything useful with his time—but regardless, he could not let his work slip.

If his performance dipped, they would _know._ They would know they had done to him the only thing that could ever break him.

And they would have won.

*

Empty of creative zest, the plentiful well of his mind soon tapped into a groundwater spring of paranoia.

He knew it, he saw it, he grunted at it in annoyance. He tried to hold back the thoughts, write them out, sit with them. _Conspiracy can be more reassuring than a displeasing reality,_ he jotted down. _The illusion of knowing ‘more’ is a desperate grasp for control._

But a man can only count so many breaths.

In the end, he cupped his parched hands, and drank.

_(Word to the Heisenberg. The properties of the object are influenced by the observer._

_Do we just see what we wish to see?)_

A decade-long con. A suspiciously perfect match put at his heel, instructed to win his trust—to _befriend_ him, subdue him, even _seduce_ him, perhaps _(how scandalous, how riveting!)_ —so he’ll always be bound to _them,_ bound to return to his Golgotha. Then, once he had grown too old and tired to be of any use, sabotage him to self-destruction, have him take himself out so nobody had to figure out a way to get rid of him. _Shit_ , thought his inappropriately-sized vain streak, _already, though?_

Or more simply, they separated them just to have Stone killed.

That was worse. _Why was it worse?_ No, no. The dot was moving. He was _fine,_ they were _fine._ He had to think the Agent’s words weren’t earnest. He _had_ to.

Because it made no _sense_ otherwise. Since when was his loyal, ruthless, relentless Agent Stone such a tame beast he did not dare defy orders? Not for his _Doctor?_ If that man had meant his words… then was it really all there was to it, a fruitless road-trip and a night of—

Had that… had that been all Stone wanted of him…? After all those years, after the missions the battles the alien the exile—? … was that _it?_ Was this the man he allowed to—

No, absolutely not. Between spineless and traitor, he knew which one made him feel less like sloughing his skin off.

He knew all too well. And yet.

***

**T-minus 647 days**

But what if things were more complex than it appeared?

What if, instead, there was a _plan?_ A code, a cipher of sorts. Oh, that was exciting. His brain liked it. Yes, codes, secrets, plans. Something Stone was counting on him to figure out right away.

The notebook, as notebooks do, hadn't moved from the drawer he’d shut it in, out in the farthest room of the house.

He turned it in his hands, subjecting it to careful scrutiny. It was a common biennial planner. That alone had to indicate… _something_ , a timescale of some sort—and perhaps Robotnik was already late on schedule, leaving Stone hanging on his side, waiting for him _again,_ too busy losing his mind like some sort of—

 _Remember the time we visited Jotoku-ji?,_ the notebook immediately shanked him with. _You had to bodily haul me off the middle of the path. Oh god, how terribly American of me. I thought you’d refuse to talk to me for the rest of the trip._

Robotnik flipped to the next page, fighting against his closing throat.

 _Here’s the recipe for your favorite matcha latte,_ it read. _To remind you a little bit of that tea ceremony. Not that you need reminders though, of course. You have a wonderful memory. I bet your remember it all like it was this morning._

He did, and he felt like going to sleep for another couple of weeks now. _Good going, Stone._

He scanned the recipe with growing desperation, mighty cogs furiously turning. The measurements were very exact. Perhaps… _too_ exact?

There are codes in everything, if one looks close enough—just this one was nothing but gibberish.

He squinted, glaring the numbers into submission. What kind of code was it, that _he_ couldn’t make sense of it at first glance?

He flipped the pages hard enough to tear, obsessively scanning the dates. _(Oh no. Oh, please, no._ There were _pictures. Why!)_ The malaise crept down, bypassing his sinking chest, coiling heavy on his diaphragm. His stomach gave a lurch.

No. No. _No, dammit._ There had to be _something._ Come on.

His vivid imagination immediately got to work plagiarizing and producing a short for his personal torment.

> DISSOLVE TO:
> 
> INT. - LABORATORY – DAY
> 
> A room, papered in magazine cut-outs and photocopied notebook pages. Walls, ceiling, windows. The work is, without question, bizarre, perhaps even mad. A spiderweb of red yarn, for that touch of whimsy and _je ne sais quoi._
> 
> A man, taller than most and as artfully disheveled as Russell Crowe could never hope to be, in an old coat that looks slept in. Meet DOCTOR ~~NASH~~ ROBOTNIK.
> 
> A montage set to dramatic crescendo. Alone, his rooting orders fall to the wayside, bombs and guns abandoned as his magic vision conjures up patterns, sees codes where there are none. He stuffs envelopes into an abandoned mailbox. He hallucinates a never-graying Agent Stone, a little blue alien that disses his music taste, a beautiful prototype that flies back into one unbroken piece.
> 
> ROBOTNIK
> 
> I can’t fail. There’s no reason for me then. Do you understand?
> 
> He used to see the answer before the question—root of genius, Oppenheimer gave. Insulin shock an inferred paroxysm—his back a sultry arch, his groan an obscene, erotomaniacal parody.
> 
> Alone, he digs into his open wrist for the secret, the radium diode.
> 
> ROBOTNIK
> 
> … there’s nothing there.
> 
> FADE TO BLACK.

Robotnik rubbed his arm, shuddering. His shirt was sticky with chilled sweat. Willfully refusing to throw up, he flipped back to the page he’d opened on.

 _The secret here is 1.25ml of almond extract! :),_ said a quick-penned note jotted in the margin, as akin to a hasty scribble as that man’s impeccable pen could ever allow. A whip of his arm, the smack of leather on stainless steel, much louder than expected.

“Don’t tell me the _secret_ s,” Robotnik shouted, half-outrage, half-plea, in the still space of his dusty kitchen. “How _dare_ you reveal the secrets.”

And then he knew. Out of nowhere, like ice-water down the collar.

There was no code.

_(There’s nothing there.)_

The planner was a goodbye note.

*

The late October rain had beaten the ground to a freezing, muddy pulp. The grass squelched between his toes, mud splattering his legs as he ran.

He was _fine,_ Robotnik had been _fine_ as he was, he’d been _fine_ for decades—why, _WHY_ did that man have to come out and _say those words_ to him, why did he have to break him _knowing_ there would be no time to glue his scattered pieces back together—why say it, if he was planning to just _roll over_ and let their superiors piss down his throat, pack him up and ship him off to fuck knows where?

He stood at the edge of the tree-line, trembling, heaving. Because really, _fuck_ , man, was that _it?_

“ _Was that it?”_ he shouted at the contorted trunks before him, silent but for the hiss of the wind. 

*

If the Agent had wanted him dead so bad, at least he should have done it quick. Cyanide’s just as sweet as almond extract, just saying. At least let it be by your hand. Have some goddamn style.

But _no_. Never. Of course not. Not punctual, sunny, caring Agent Stone.

No, this useless, syrupy, brainless waste of paper was _earnest._ Every bastard word on it was _meant._ Sincere to its gooey, sinewy center. A face-value item, stand-in for that man’s face-value words.

It was the longest, most agonizing, most insulting and cruel prank that he, bullied since the day he was cut from his umbilical cord, had ever been subjected to.

_What luck. What a fucking curse._

*

“ _Was it?_ I _MacGyvered_ an _interplanetary portal_ from the ass-crack of an uncivilized planet on the other side of the galaxy _out of twigs and stipes and an Eulipotyphlan quill_ to get back to you—and you couldn’t even bother to _overthrow the fucking military_ to stay with me? You—spineless, weaselly, ungrateful _brat_ , why wouldn’t you _FIGHT?_ You lost your backbone in Iraq?!”

His arm, a Roman catapult. The little book, a mighty boulder. His objective: get it over the Gallic walls if it cost him his fucking ulnar ligament.

“ _Give me a BIG! FAT!_ _ **BREAK**_ _!!”_

The notebook flew high, pages spreading wide like ill-engineered wings. He heard it land in the undergrowth with a rustle of leaves, with a scattering of forest life used to peaceful cohabitation.

He stood at the edge of the woods and screamed his throat raw in the wind-howl, as though through fury alone he could set the wind-bent firs ablaze, and swore to let the book dissolve to mulch.

At least, one good use for it.

*

**T-minus 641 days**

_Honey-pickled Lemon Tea – for a sore throat._

_Happy Birthday to myself! … not a very happy one, though, I’d imagine. I got myself this planner last year and I had such different plans for it. I liked your late gift a lot better, anyway. A pen made on another planet that mounts standard 38mm Earth cartridges! I take it with me everywhere. You really can make anything out of nothing, it’s always incredible._

_Bundle up for me this winter, though, okay? Don’t catch a cold._

The paper was sturdier than he’d given it credit for.

Some pages were smudged, but still readable for the most part. Curse Mr. Eveready and his waterproof ink.

It had rained again, that day. It kept coming down in sheets, washing out the remote landscape to a gray, rocky slate. He nursed the cold he’d gone out of his way to catch, and could not get the damn thing out of his mind. When he finally caved and ran out to get it, a ptarmigan gave him a look that said, _Make up your mind, mate._

He had cleaned it, let it air-dry, and patched it up. Restored the planner like some sort of illuminated manuscript, nursed this Florentine Codex of betrayal more than he did his fever. He reclaimed it, with his selfish human hands, ruthlessly tearing it from nature’s mulchy bosom.

As he often did, he triumphed. A job well done. Only the last page, where the book had landed open, was too damaged to save, and fell apart as he lifted it.

Whatever. No one writes anything important on the last page, anyway.

*

**T-minus 638 days**

_Fortnum’s Gunpowder Earl Grey - for long trips._

_I miss you. I could write it on every page, make it so redundant you get tired of reading it. I want to be noble, say I wish you didn't miss me. I'd be lying._

"... bastard.”

*

**T-minus 622 days**

He’d been reading it. A bit. Mostly the recipes.

Some days, he had the emotional bandwidth to skim the anecdote, too. Most days, he shifted into power-saving mode and spared himself. He refused to follow the days in order. Thing about orders was that, see, he’d had _enough._

"At least one of us has got to have principles."

His throat was still a bit tender. He time-traveled, flipping from winter to summer, on the hunt for some iced coffee.

 _July 6th. A year ago today, I hit my lowest point,_ he read instead, date catching his eye under the recipe steps. _You six months gone, whole world a mess_ — _me at the end of my rope trying to keep all of our things in one piece. All I could think was, “If only he were here,” all the time._

_You told me that, ever since we started working together, I’ve been your rock (!)… but I realized just how much I’ve always relied on you for certainty. To know what to do. For smart solutions to stupid problems._

_It’ll be 11 months of me gone when you read this. All I know is I don’t want you visiting those dark places I did when I got low. You’ve already been through so much. I wish I had a smart solution to give you, for once. It’s hard not to feel utterly powerless in all this. I’m sorry._

_Just… hold on. Please._

*

He thought of mirrors. A man missing a man missing a man. Fractals of separation, displaced in time, catoptromantically identical in their ache.

The infuriating thing was, the dot on the map wasn’t even _that_ far away, in the grand scheme of things. It was still on the same planet, looking up at the same sky. At those same stars Robotnik had rambled about, shielding himself in myth to not speak outright, his directness deserting him _just this once_ as bare-eyed Stone stared upwards and understood him still, as he always did.

He closed his eyes, visualizing eleven months passed instead of the mere three.

He was well-acquainted with _lack,_ but not with _loss._ The _not-having,_ while troubling in a general, life-dulling wistful way, was nothing to the not-having- _anymore._ It was the body-wide discomfort of illness to the searing ache of a chopped-off limb. That’s what it was.

A Severing.

*

A two-year long goodbye. 730 inches of a chiliad, rain-buckled lined 90gsm sandwiched in mud-brittled black leather.

A to-do list to survival. Just what you would expect, from Mr. Eveready.

_(Please, hold on.)_

*

With today soon over, there would be 640 days left. _And then? What then?_ Hush. One at a time. 

Stone’s plan had him all good and moved on by the end of the two years—he better get a wiggle on.

He could hold on. He was _great_ at holding on. He’d done it before, he’d done it all his life. To what and for what, for once, he had no idea.

But if an alien mushroom nightmare hadn’t killed him, like _hell_ he was gonna let this win.

***

**T-minus 608 days**

_Foamed Oat Milk London Fog with Raw Manuka Honey – for a special occasion._

_Happy Birthday, Doctor! You never liked a lot of fuss about it, I know, I know. But I’d still like it if you treated yourself to something nice. You deserve it._

He could make an exception for this, just this once.

After all, almost no one knew about the plight of his unknown birthday. The data available was: 1) the day he’d been taken in by the orphanage (December 24th, 1962. Real gift to humanity); 2) his weight and measurements taken at the time, which when tested against growth averages, allowed the estimation of two or three weeks of age.

The year was known, the month was an approximation of re-engineered bone plate testing, and the day was pure whimsy. In private arbitration, he had picked the 7th of December. It was a prime number, lucky in Japanese folklore, and it would have made him a Sagittarius. And it was a Thursday, truly _the_ optimal day to have a child that you plan to send down the river _on Christmas Eve._

(They’d always told him his gift showed early, in a way not unlike Dahl’s _Matilda._ But evidently, not early enough.)

Anyway, for the sake of convenience, despite the incongruity, they had defaulted him as born on January 1st, 1963.

As defiance against being damned to forever know he was legally a year younger than he actually was, and resentful of the physical way a conceptual abstraction like _neglect_ had dared to reroute his neural paths, Robotnik was now doubling the sugar in the chocolate-coffee cake recipe he was trying his hand at.

The December 7th page in the notebook even had a little pen doodle etched in it—a cake with two candles, 5 and 9.

All the recipes in the planner were single-serve. Stone, the rude little shit, knew he’d be alone on his chosen birthday, alone on the _Anniversary of His Great Return_ (a.k.a. Christmas, or whatever), alone on his Fake Legal Birthday-slash-New-Year’s. Alone facing the ever-closer specter of old age, breathing down his neck like the _Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come._

So, he could very well add as much sugar as he felt like having, thanks.

 _Bah, humbug._ Good riddance, honestly, no one to frown his perfect eyebrows all _concerned_ and whine about glycemic indexes and cholesterol values and whatnot—where was that _concern,_ when Robotnik was stranded boiling contaminated alien water and chewing mucky roots like a starving _okapi?_ Who was there to track his _macros_ then, huh? He was lucky he still had a gut flora—no thanks to anyone but his own damn resilience.

*

_(He’d always felt the weight of it, his almost-secret clandestine month. When he’d been alive off the record, stateless and alone and pure of bureaucracy, unclaimed by the system._

_Perhaps, that had been the last time he’d truly been free.)_

*

The cake was over-sweet. The gut flora went on strike.

Life is nothing but ironic misery, unshared.

*

**T-minus 479 days**

_Double ristretto, black – for a pick me up. (But don’t overdo it, okay?)_

Robotnik was in drought.

“Don’t tell me what to do,” he gritted out, overdoing it.

Anger had always been the rain to his boiling blood, diluent of balance and dissipation, and he had never before looked inside his well and found it all dried up.

He had expected to sustain on the vigor of his rage for a while still—and instead it hibernated in the long winter, left him empty and listless. And when spring came, it did not awaken.

*

He had thawed. The duvet of numbness had faded, and the pain had come trickling in.

There are aches that all the _Balasana_ in the world couldn’t soothe, and the Severing still ached with the unfathomable eeriness of an amputation. Phantom pain, absence made physical. ‘ _s all in your head, kid._ Neural misfire.

We are more resilient than we think. Robotnik, troubled past and troubled present, was no stranger to pain.

He got shot a number of times, in his younger and less compliant days. He had operated on himself, had to face his own insides. He had broken bones and had fallen ill and had dealt with the aftershocks of prolonged stress. He’d had to pass a kidney stone once—such undignified agony, barely a step above a kick in the nuts—and he thought he’d either die or go mad.

Now he slept and worked and little else, but work was regurgitated drudgery. Food, when any, had little taste. His legs tangled through uninspired dance steps, a force of habit made frustration—even music was nothing but noise: all those words about _love,_ all those empty promises.

Less than a year since the black letters came, and he had already forgone the groomed symmetries that had kept him together. He was the ghoul of the base, anyway, hadn’t seen a soul in many a moon.

He even stopped checking the tracker. Awareness of location brought him the opposite of solace.

That too, seemed pointless.

*

He’d been on the fast track his whole life. A bright future, some real potential. Rounded up for work when his voice was still a-crackin’. He’d peaked in their hands, wrung dry, bled dry. Wasn’t it enough?

 _Decommission me, chief. I’m all done._ He let his head fall back against the kitchen cabinets. He wanted silence, he wanted an empty planet, he wanted it to _stop_.

He wasn’t holding on like his Agent wanted him to.

In this, too, Robotnik was failing him.

*

During the winter, every time he drove up he’d taken to braking his car on the cliff-edged bend of a hairpin turn.

Rain, shine, or blizzard, he’d sit there and think, _how easy it would be. With the snow and all. How tragic._

*

(In recurring dreams, he and his prototype sit alone in the uncertain midday of an alien world, propped onto each other on the cliff-edge they crashed on.

The Doctor, with his broken collarbone. The prototype, with her shattered chassis and ripped off-wings. Fragile, broken things, cast out. More alone than anyone has ever been.

 _We will never fly again, will we?_ he murmurs to the machine. _Beloved, are you there?_

Quill detached, the last of the flyer’s backup battery gives out with a sputter, a lone spark in the damp air. Distorted hum a death rattle.

 _No, no, no,_ he keens, delirious with pain. _Please. Not you too.)_

*

All pain is all in the mind.

 _I could fit the car with a parachute,_ he had started musing. _Just in case I change my mind halfway._

*

**T-minus 397 days**

_Strawberry-infused Sparkling Spring Water – for those no-fuss summer days._

_It will get better. I promise. Drink the whole glass. And another one, if you can._

What were two years to a lifetime? Days trickled off his mind like de Marsiliis’ water torture. Hours were days and days were centuries to a brain like his. Stone knew this. How could he know and still expect him to move on?

“Who are you to make promises?”

He couldn’t, he _couldn’_ t, it was too much—he was letting himself sink down to all the places he’d been wary of. The thoughts were not going away. He _couldn’t,_ he was _done,_ he was _tired,_ he wanted _out._

_(You’re everything to me, and I need you to hold on. Please, put it off. Just one more day.)_

***

**T-minus 376 days**

_Gyokuro Iced Tea with Crushed Lime and Mint – for those really hot days!_

_Note: I’m sorry some notes in here are a bit of a downer. I’m trying to project a year from now and it’s so hard_ — _the time you’ve been away kind of erased itself from my mind, and now I struggle to even imagine... not being able to talk to you, make you meals, not knowing if you’re doing okay. I know you’re perfectly capable of taking care of yourself, but we’ve been looking after each other from the start… I just like making sure._

Time was going backwards.

Summer. The memory of that man at its most vivid. 354 days since the Severing. A lifetime since the motel. Only his own arms, and his lonely sheets, and the water-damaged planner under his pillow, whispering _hold on, hold on, hold on._

*

There on those scratchy motel sheets he had lain, the world forgotten, and felt Stone’s heartbeat through the root of him as he moved slow and deep, flowing within as waves onto shore. 

His mind drifted into blissful blankness, _just this once_ , dreamquiet and lost to natural imagery and the beautiful buzzing of atoms, ever-spinning, never touching.

And in the growing roil of that perfect exchange, the Agent held safe inside him—absolved, belonging—the shore of him had melted into the sea-roll. Down had crashed his sandcastles, eroded, leaving only the name wrung from his lungs like a prayer.

He wished it’d never end. Minutes to days, hours to centuries. He wanted it to last enough to reshape the landscape of him, make his edges smooth and new, sand him down to the sweet child he'd been in a life long gone.

The rhythm of it an imprint he can recall at will, like that man’s caring words, his gentle hands, the empty oaths in that beautiful mouth.

*

He was a _disgrace,_ there conversing with a pre-written narrative as if it could reply back. As if it _understood._ Trapped in the world’s lamest epistolary romance—one-sided, one-handed, time-lapsed.

It was just so _stupid._

*

Paul D of Sweet Home had wanted his Sethe for twenty-five years.

Her harrowing journey, her stolen milk, the children that she’d brought into the world and taken out of it—all her suffering the man had held in his hands, willing to carry it for her. He’d curved over her _and learned the way of her sorrow, the roots of it; its wide trunk and intricate branches._ Then, the maturity of her body—gravity and childbirth, and even the cherry-choke tree on her back, crux of her tragedy—once object of heart-rending reverence, became revolting in his eyes the instant he had had her.

Twenty-five years, he had wanted her. Gone in an instant.

Did it matter that he stayed in the end, if he had lost his reverence? If she was now repulsive to him, body and soul and baby-haunted house?

 _This is the price of trust,_ he thought. He’d opened up, too wide, too sudden, he’d shown himself as the mortal, needy, pathetic thing he was. And he had been too much (of course), his scars too old and ugly (of course), his pain too heavy to carry (of course).

He should have known, really.

His own runaway mother, too, should have slit his throat instead.

*

**T-minus 339 days**

Change is the nature of the universe. Nature would not be satisfied without a charge with spin, if Tomonaga got it right. Something would shift, no matter how distant it felt now. This was his parenthesis of utter despair, before his superior intellect kicked in and he’d adapt and overcome. How it always had been. It would not be one more year of _this_.

He just had to _hold on._

Any day now.

*

Alone with the rustling of early autumn leaves.

Alone with the elk and mule deer circling the house like earth-bound vultures, nudging the fence, grown fearless in the silence.

Alone with the fear of flying, only bastion left between him and the cliffs.

*

**T-minus 311 days**

_Black Pepper & Turmeric Golden Milk Latte – for a change of pace!_

He had disappeared seven of them.

They sent them in, one after the other like calves to the slaughter, ever since this ridiculous circus started and he had been graciously allowed to resume his life’s work.

Ironically, he’d been getting a lot of praise. As he was working from his stash and running on limited energy, he had stopped pushing for innovation and side-projects. Must be why they kept trying to saddle him with assistants.

 _Keep it up,_ he wanted to say, feeling the bile rise like floodwater whenever he thought of it. _See if you can push me to active sabotage._

*

Where did they even find them? His _reputation_ spanned far and wide, and they could still find recruits to send into his waiting jaws.

Doctor Robotnik, the _Ба́ба-Яга́_ of the military machine.

They sent them in younger and younger. Sacrificial lambs playing army dress-up in kid-sized fatigues and steel toe-caps. Black-clad, barefaced. Cusp of this perverse mind game—all orphans. Ears wet, jaws cracking with post-adolescent compulsive yawning and impacted wisdom teeth. The stuff of nightmares.

And the _stench,_ oh god.

That sour panic-sweat, right as they walked through the door. They knew instantly the mistake they’d made, knew that they weren’t the first to step through that door and not come out.

Would the Doctor slow-roast them for his stew, or put his lab on chicken legs and make a mad dash for it?

Just one way to find out!

*

He gave less and less chances to waste his time. His patience had not replenished.

He spun a 3D globe with a distracted wave of his hand. “Just pick a place. Anywhere. And you’ll wake up there. Mouth shut, low profile. _Capiche?_ ”

And every time _(every damn time!):_ “A-anywhere?”

“Anywhere! Is there an echo in here?” He sketched a forceful gesture, making the globe spin wildly. “Rack your brain! Where would you go if you hadn’t entangled yourself in this whole scam?”

Waste of breath for everyone, to be here. Growing up in here, especially. It was _principle,_ not something as dumb as _empathy._ He used to do this even before getting his face rubbed in his own humanity like a house-broken dog.

“Nope, _no_ , none of that,” he groaned when they inevitably cracked and started bawling all over his clean floor. Not much menace, a great deal of exasperation. “Kid, I wish someone had disappeared _me_ like this, when I was your age.”

Hesitantly, they told him a place. Not hesitantly, he popped up some registries and made a distracted wiping gesture. “There, you’re dead now. ‘Grats! You’ve never met me, I never existed. Now go to sleep and go bye bye.”

“Doctor, I—” 

“Don’t bother hiding the vehicle when you wake up. It will find its way.”

“I just… thank y—”

Finally, silence. Sometimes, not even etorphine could kick in fast enough.

*

Of the seven, he had only killed two.

Despite the spiderweb of carefully constructed rumors he was definitely _not_ losing the edges of, he’d never been merciless.

One was a 30-something PoS with a _reputation_ that would have made Bennington queasy. The other a baby fascist, already indoctrinated to the marrow. He didn’t have the time or bandwidth for either, so he just made them go away in the less literal sense.

He’d never been _charitable_ , either.

*

**T-minus 243 days**

_Traditional Spiced Christmas Glögg with Dried Cranberries and Roasted Almonds – for the most special occasion._

_Happy 60th-but-legally-soon-59th Birthday! The recipe has raisins, but I know you don’t like them. I can’t believe I’ll be missing this. It would have been so special. I’ll celebrate from wherever I am, maybe record a message or something. I’d give anything to call you. But maybe… by this point you wouldn’t want me to, huh? You’ve always been so resilient, after all._

Great, just what he needed. Agent _Slut-For-Orders_ Stone, calling _him_ flaky on his own birthday. Astounding.

He returned to mixing his spices, and carefully pondered over the elastic properties of the heart, in the immortal words of Sia (2013).

What would he do, if Stone were to call?

Yeah, maybe he was right. Maybe he would just hang up.

***

**T-minus 174 days**

_Dark Roast Latte with Steamed Austrian Goat Milk – for old times’ sa_ —

Robotnik picked the notebook back up and clutched it to his chest.

“Sorry,” he murmured, checking that the binding was still in one piece. “I promised I wouldn’t throw you again. You blindsided me. I didn’t mean to.”

But no, not this one. He couldn’t do this one.

 _It was your favorite_ , the planner pointed out. _I’ve lost count how many of these I made you. Once per week, at least._

“That was a long time ago.” He stared the recipe down, sullen and shivering. Many things used to be his favorite. “Crown jewel of my extravagant, lactose-intolerant tastes, wasn’t it?”

The count was 312, and he remembered each and every one. His damn memory. Always a gift, always a torment.

 _Hey, what do you think,_ the note replied, rudely disrupting the thread of conversation, _if they ever haul me back to Montana, do I send a card to the Wachowskis? Gonna try and land a right hook on Tom for you if I get the chance._

The memory of those delightfully sour lattes tasted only of new-car smell, from Beloved’s shiny neo-leather seat and the skin-close embrace of his flight-suit as they readied her for flight. Her first, their last. By itself, the recollection of the memory of the smell was enough to send the crash ringing out in his ears, made him furious at the way trauma is cellular.

_(And it tasted of that morning, too. A whiff of motor oil clinging to a pristine suit. A kiss goodbye. A lingering ache, hidden.)_

He could not fly not because he did not want to, but because his body did not _let_ him. He could not fly because he had crashed, and the damn system was convinced he was going to crash every single time. The damn system was convinced he would crash on purpose.

How touching of his body, to be so adamant to avoid destruction. It had never been so vocal about it before.

_Give something an inch, takes a light-year._

*

Bitter irony of an August morning. That man getting in his own prototype for a first-last flight, whisked away to his own carefully-charted exile.

_No, not this one._

_Not yet, at least._

*

**T-minus 111 days**

_Assam Yuanyang – for compromises._

_Whenever I’m on mission, wherever they send me, I’ll always keep an eye out for your work. If I go, at least let it be by one of ours, right? I daren’t ask for more._

Work had been… strange.

They called him into meetings less and less, perhaps tired of his audio-only check-ins. They tried to send him on mission less and less, perhaps tired of being told to go to hell.

Despite this, incongruently, he’d never been so appreciated.

Finally, they thought, we’ve done it. The beast has been broken in. Robotnik didn’t demand to be present for all field testing anymore. He didn’t make a fuss about his _babies_ coming home scratched up. Finally, after years of pressure, he had acquiesced to delegating repairs to sub-contractors—finally let the scurrying rats round up and chew out the secrets of his art into the bite-sized pieces their brains could comprehend.

Joke was on them. There were no secrets in those things.

Ugly, uninspired bespoke junk, obsolete tech that put dollar-sign sparkles in all those bloodthirsty fools’ eyes. All within budget within specs within requirements. The endless fight for excellence, aesthetics, and innovation was over. No more uncomfortably accurate death-count predictions in his presentations.

_This is all we wanted of you. Thank you, finally. Thank you. Keep up the good work._

It had been the most depressing biennial of his career, mushroom exile included. And he’d never been praised so much. Finally, they had him the way they’d always wanted him: bound, gagged, declawed. A dead-eyed circus tiger whipped through his routine.

If it had all been a ploy to get to this… well, damn, it worked out fantastically. Had they known, he was willing to bet, they would have taken Agent Stone from him much, much sooner.

He _loathed_ it.

*

At least, by the mysterious machinations of situational irony, his immunity had reached Godlike tier. Most of his estate had been seized to rebuild San Francisco while he was away, but the Egyptian government never even knew his _name._ He’d sniped more competitors in the past year than in the past decade. It was great.

Compromise. There were other things to take care of, these days.

If he was going out, he guessed, at least it would be with a bang.

*

**T-minus 78 days**

_That One Overpriced Fix You Like, But Better and Healthier – for when you can’t be bothered to drive into town just to spend 5$ on sub-par beans._

_Two full years since those letters came. Man, how will we be? How will you be? I can’t even imagine. Maybe you’ve stopped reading by this point. I hope you’re okay. I hope I’m okay_ — _hope I haven’t got myself KIA already._

A fresh pang of dread. He had deactivated the tracker some time ago, because it was too much of a ~~destruction~~ distraction. And now he was too chicken to reactivate it.

Because he knew. He’d been living with his impulsive nerves and over-eager brain all his life. He knew that, with the planner down to the double-digits and him not even close to moving on _(Cheers for the trust as always, Agent,)_ he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from going to him and backhanding him into a wall.

And, fresh from his re-read of Bashō’s _Oku no Hosomichi,_ he more than ever mourned that lost last page as he opened the planner from the wrong side.

What was the _point_ of this epistolary nonsense, if he didn’t get an ending?

*

He did have to admit it, though. Some days, it was soothing.

His own space, remote and undisturbed. The valley of his mind again blanketed in pristine snow, as it was before the spring had come and the Agent with it. Again immersed in the comforting stillness of exile.

If he wanted to travel, it was pack and go. No decisions to discuss with anyone, not even the need to mention it, no spaces to share. Breathing room anywhere he wanted. No difficult feelings to painstakingly straighten out and weave into inadequate verbiage.

And it did feel _right_ , to be undivided, to feel like a whole person.

Being _inconvenienced_ was fine. _Missing_ was on thin ice. _Needing_ was unacceptable.

Of all the things he never wanted to become, _dependent_ was top of the list.

*

Some days, really, it was soothing.

Then the night would come.

***

**T-minus 32 days**

_Blend-mix Cardamom Kahweh with Date Sugar – for a bit of nostalgia. Just a bit._

_I know these last few days I’ve relied a lot on inspirational quotes. Damn lazy. You must be so annoyed. But I really… I can’t see this far. I admit it, I really tried. I’m so sorry it has to be like this. If I’m still alive, I promise I’m still holding on. And if you’re_ ~~_alive_ ~~ _okay… I hope you read till the last page._

Some sort of superstitious, irrational fear had kept him from reactivating the tracker.

Robotnik wasn’t concerned about not finding the phone. The pieces of his tech had always been good at finding each other, and finding their way home.

Rather, perhaps the phone would not find the man carrying it. Future-bound promises don’t make for a solid foundation. Nor for great odds, for the matter.

What if, for some daft reason, the damn thing just was no longer with him. What if there was no longer a him to track. What if it pinged from some random somewhere—thrown in a dingy locker at the back of a terrorist cell’s interrogation room. At the bottom of the ocean. What if an explosion had scattered the shock-proof bits of it to kingdom come.

*

He’d got back up the first time, twisted and tortured like a wind-grown tree.

But hey. He’d survived _one_ crash, already.

* * *

***

**T-minus 8 minutes**

His thumb caresses the switch, back and forth, back and forth.

1700 hours, say the cooling blues of the dashboard clock.

He stands in silence for a while, gathering the stillness of the hangar, gathering his words. The stillness roots him in his body as the roof slowly slides open, letting the sunlight in.

_(Who are you, in exile?)_

“I’ve lost your sister,” he finally says, voice cracking, exhale shaky. “We crashed on another planet, three years ago. I had to leave her there all alone.”

The near-identical copy, despite having been left to sit there in glorified storage all this time, accepts his gentle, apologetic touch. The prototype hums to life under his hand, fully charged and prepped up courtesy of his automation systems. She follows her programming, efficient and silent.

Talking to objects is inner dialogue turned outward. No room for delusions, merely a tool to use to his advantage, to more easily listen to himself.

“Forgive me, Beloved,” he tells the machine, weaving prosoche into inefficient words. “I’ve been so careless.”

*

August 7th, 2023. There’s something to say about mirrors.

What does it say about him, that despite his aversion to orders he is respecting the imposed confines of this whole predicament? What does it say, if he’s finally had enough—of freedom denied and bureaucratic claustrophobia and this cloying stupidity and no one to deride it with—if he’s finally snapped and gone off the deep end? What does it say about his integrity, even if his bags are packed and his affairs are in order and the charges are placed and ready?

Reputation notwithstanding, when all is stripped away all a man has is his character.

The spare of his flight-suit fits, still. Sorta. Tight in places, loose in others. He tries not to think about it.

 _(Does he dare show himself, show he hasn’t been strong enough to maintain the status quo, preserve himself as Stone remembers him_ — _care for himself as Stone wanted him to?)_

“I haven’t flown since,” he confesses, climbing into the cockpit with the ease of muscle memory. “But I know you’ll take good care of me.”

Often, putting his hands on the work of pre-exile Robotnik felt like tampering with someone else’s stuff. The peer he never had, there on his lonely peak. Would have left _himself_ a diary, had he known.

He contemplates this separation, readying the machine for take-off, clipping the power-quill into place. He tries to breathe, counting, his whole body already tense and aching with post-traumatic fright.

“Right. We have to fly before everything here goes up like a firework. It’s you and me now, baby girl. We are going on a _mission_.”

He feeds the coordinates into the system, unsteady hands on the pristine touch-screen. Robotnik breathes out and there it is. His treacherous little dot on the map. Moving vehicle, currently wandering off wherever, Minnesota.

“There he is. Same planet as us.”

Anything can be rebuilt. Except human life. Except human connections.

_(Is this thing parasitic, or symbiotic?_

_Will you tell me?_

_Well, only one way to find out.)_

All systems go.

The battered little planner finds its spot on the dashboard, unnervingly out of place.

“We have to find out what was going through that man’s head when he made this wretched thing. You go and arm the lasers, then we’ll see when we get there.”

Sometimes, there’s no closure. Sometimes, closure is thrust upon you in the form of a biennial planner you didn’t need. Sometimes, closure is something you go and fight tooth and nail for until you’ve clawed it back from nature’s greedy, ever-spinning hands.

Even if there’s nothing there for him anymore—even if the rejection breaks his twisted branches. He is Doctor Robotnik, and he’s been curled up quietly dying for far too long.

*

He blinks, and they’re flying.

It’s as good as it ever was.

*

They will reach their target by 1800 hours, the AI says.

“You and I are going to find out what was on that last page.” He swallows, throat clicking. “And if I crash, I crash.”

The instruments register an energy surge, a cacophony of sound starting behind him. In the soundproof cockpit, he hears nothing but his favorite playlist. He’s decided, he’s not going to skip _that song_ when it comes up, not this time.

For what feels like the first time in years, he grins, letting his mustache twitch up into a menacing curl.

“Let’s go get him.”

**Author's Note:**

> Astra was spoiling me, I had to retaliate.


End file.
